Ah.... per year. Ok... that makes much more sense. For some reason, I thought he was talking about a monthly payment, but no clue what made me think he alluded to that in the original article now that I look back at it.
It just further reinforces my original points though. Even if Alaska was offering me potentially $1,000-$2,000 per MONTH to move there, I wouldn't consider it enough justification to do it.
When the need arises, I usually go with Uber. No opinion on Lyft except it just doesn't have the same availability. Where I live, nobody is driving for them right now - but Uber has a local presence.
Also use traditional cabs in the right situation. (EG. If you land at the airport in New Orleans and need to get to your hotel? You may as well just use a cab, because they've made the whole process so easy. They charge a flat rate so you know exactly what it will cost, and they have someone at the airport right by the exit door who helps flag down the next available cab in an orderly fashion for you. They even hand you a standard printed packet with some coupons for area establishments along with the cab's rate card and info to contact customer service if you have any issues with your ride.)
Zuckerberg seems to conveniently ignore the fact that the dividends paid on oil in Alaska are a pretty unique scenario in the USA. That was implemented long before anyone was running around praising the virtues of a UBI for all citizens. Everyone has understood that the money paid out for being an Alaska citizen is well balanced out by some huge downsides of choosing Alaska as your place of residence.
If this wasn't the case, you'd have a disproportionately large number of people moving to Alaska with their families, hoping to collect that $5,000 - $6,000 per month of zero effort income. Heck, one might ask why Zuck didn't start Facebook from Alaska, given how great those monthly government payouts are?
The frustrating thing about UBI is you've got people from all political affiliations discussing it as a potentially viable (even inevitable) outcome, but they're really talking about two COMPLETELY different things. The people trying to push for implementing it today are just pushing socialism under a different name. If the economy is based on Capitalism, a UBI won't ever do anything except create inflation. The economy will adjust to the assumption that everyone suddenly has this "baseline income" they can spend, even if they do nothing at all to try to earn more.
The types discussing UBI as a long term possibility are more interested in a hypothetical post-Capitalist economy where automation and technology has advanced so far, it made human labor obsolete. Machines are fixing other machines that do all manner of work required. In this scenario, people would be essentially free to pursue anything that interested them. Money would still change hands, but you'd only use it for "extras". Perhaps hand-made furniture would become a luxury that many people appreciated as a type of art, despite anyone being able to obtain all the basic furniture they needed at little or no cost, given out by a government in charge of the operation of the robots and machines that assemble the rest of it? So if you WANTED to do it, you could build your own furniture and sell it at a premium. But you would have no NEED to work to survive. But this is more like the "Star Trek" universe than reality any time in the near future.
Like I pointed out on another forum recently.... after 6 or 7 generations of them, you still can't even buy a Roomba that reliably cleans your house with no human intervention. They break regularly, need new batteries, brushes and other parts, get stuck under furniture, can't clean stairs, and have dust bins that are so small they need regular assistance emptying them out. All the hype about robots taking all the jobs? We're a LONG way from that reality still.
Statistically, we've got fewer and fewer avid TV watchers. People, by and large, realize that there are other things more worthy of their time. The result is, you've got a larger percentage of low IQ and low motivation losers actually watching television for hours each day, so it's no surprise the programming is adjusted to suit them.
The people with any kind of clue are gravitating more towards programming on demand like Netflix, where you get to watch what YOU want to see, WHEN you want to see it. And they're spending more time online where things aren't just a 1 way passive digestion of media.
I agree with you... don't get me wrong. I've worked in I.T. for around 20 years in small to mid-sized businesses, both more "blue collar" type manufacturing places and "white collar" marketing places. And my own experiences are the same as yours. My co-workers and I in I.T. just want to get things done and accomplish the goal of making the business run a little bit better for everybody. Female co-workers I've worked with always seemed to be on that same page, and I don't recall any of the issues you keep hearing about in Silicon Valley.
But that said? Another person who replied to your post is correct too. This behavior tends to come from those in power positions in companies, not the "rank and file" workers. The upper management types are used to making demands and having the rest of the workforce rush around trying to meet those demands. Is it stupid for them to risk their well-paid position for a sexual affair with somebody? Arguably yes! But sex has always been about emotions over logic. And for some, the thrill of "possibly getting caught" makes the whole thing way more exciting and enticing.
I've definitely worked at a couple of places where I had strong suspicions that an attractive younger gal was, indeed, involved in a secret relationship with a President or CIO of Finance. The whole time I worked for those companies though? They were never formally accused or "outed" for it. I suspect that's reality in the Valley too. A lot of this misbehavior has gone unpunished because plenty of females working there don't want to lose a good paying job that keeps a roof over their head and a car note paid. And being subordinate to the folks in the power positions at or near the top? They're going to have a big, uphill battle involving attorneys at great expense if they want to go up against it.
If you look at the iPad's history, you find it was something Steve Jobs basically dreamed up as his health was starting to fail and he was spending more time lying in hospital beds, or at least lying down, resting.
And that's pretty much exactly what the device was outstanding at doing.... providing a better experience for viewing or manipulating digital content when you're not sitting down.
Not only did it make a pretty good device to read your emails in bed at night, but it turns out it was pretty handy for doctors who have to work with and review data while standing up or walking around.
Ever since Tim Cook became CEO, the whole tone seems to have changed. He made public comments that he hardly uses a laptop computer anymore and seems to truly think tablets and touchscreens are the future of computing for a large segment of the population.
No matter how hard Apple pushes that idea though? Where I see iPads proliferating the most are at the opposite end of the spectrum. More and more, they're being implemented as single purpose control panels or kiosks. You can hang one on a conference room wall and integrate it with a calendar/scheduling system so everyone can book meetings with a couple of taps, or see when the room is going to be in use. It may even remote control the video-conference itself. These uses don't require a high end model though. Right now, all of these "Square registers" used in small stores and everything else are essentially re-purposing and extending the lives of all of the older iPads still in operation.
The high end iPad Pros have a niche for artists, certainly. But otherwise, they really only make sense as compliments to a full blown computer. When you know you won't need the power or full functionality of a notebook, you can bring the iPad instead.
I tend to agree. I don't have any first- hand knowledge of the job situation in Israel, but it sounds parallel to what I see all the time in America, really. People come up with all of these startup business concepts that (of course) require custom code to be written to build the software that will run on phones, tablets or computers to make it all happen. But they view the code building process a lot like hiring people to build a new shed in their yard or to do landscaping work.
Basically, they want cheap labor, and aren't opposed to using foreigners if that saves a lot of money on the project's cost.
Just this afternoon, I was attending a "lunch and learn" type of I.T. event and overheard the head of a cloud service provider talking about his past and background. He said he started out learning to code and worked as a software developer for 5 or 6 years. But eventually, he realized it was the type of career where you could spend 8 hour days sitting in front of a PC at your own house and not even socializing with anybody you work for. Perhaps, you'd have a meeting for an hour or two, once a week. But otherwise, you were forgotten about except as another "line item" on people's project management plan. "Check on progress of code for XYZ." That's why he started his own company on the service side of things, and never looked back.
And generally, I'd say that's gotten worse in recent years. Now, you're just disposable in many cases. Code up what you're asked to build, and then they might get rid of you if they don't have any new software project plans in the works. Code maintenance and fixes? Meh... outsource those to some OTHER 3rd. party who comes in as the low bidder.
I never took much interest in the coding part of computing either. (Well, I wrote a bulletin board system in BASIC back in the 80's -- but that's the extent of it for me.) I think if you really care about it though, it should be treated like a craft that you keep working to improve, year after year -- probably while building applications you can sell for yourself. Otherwise, you're liable to get short-changed.
In many smaller cities and towns, the water treatment plants are older (circa 1970's or so) and expensive to maintain. I live in one such city, along the Potomac River, and our water bills are combined with sewer and trash pickup. We're billed once every 3 months, and the typical bill is easily in excess of $350. Trash collection is only once per week here, with no yard waste pickup - so it really only amounts to $80 or so of the total bill. The rest is sewer and water, which go hand-in-hand.
If you have a small water leak, such as a toilet that keeps running after you flush it and you don't catch and correct it immediately? It can easily run the water bill up to the $600-800 range.
So yeah.... there is actually some incentive for a dishonest person to hack the system in some way, if possible.
One of my best friends decided to become a chiropractor, years ago -- so I got to learn a fair bit about that whole process and the challenges it presented.
First off? Yeah, it's true. A whole lot of people become a chiropractor because they're looking for a profession they can make a lot of money in, without all the studying required for a genuine medical degree. This isn't unlike a lot of people who go into dentistry though, either. In other words, it's not really a reason to write the whole field off as useless. It just means you've got to navigate the "minefield" of people who care more about buying their next luxury car or vacation home than your health.
But the other issue is, chiropractors do generally struggle to get well established. The guys with the big practices running ads on the radio constantly are the few that the rest of them aspire to be someday. People like my buddy started out genuinely wanting to help people manage their pain without resorting to getting all doped up on pain medications. That's, IMO, pretty legitimate. Problem is -- that doesn't quite pay the bills. His chiropractic college he graduated from put him almost 6 figures in student loan debt, and then he had to take out the small business loan for his own office and equipment. What usually happens is the struggling chiro says, "You know.... I could really use something to pad my revenue and pay the rent on this place. I know this lady who does acupuncture who needs an office to work out of....", or "Nobody ever got hurt taking a few essential vitamins and minerals. I should start selling some of these on the side." Before long, their practice is hawking all sorts of nonsense alternative medicine (because there's a demand for that from those who believe in it), and it's all justifiable if you view it as the power of the placebo effect and state of mind playing a role in how healthy you feel.
I think some people truly do get benefit from chiropractors, and that's a big reason insurance companies will still pay out for visits to them after car accidents. If it was pure quackery, they would have refused to give them a dime long ago. I used to know a gal, for example, who had some serious back problems. On a good day, she'd be up walking or running about like nothing was wrong at all. But she had occasional situations where her back would literally seize up, and she couldn't straighten herself back up after bending over, or found she couldn't get up out of bed in the morning. Traditional doctors didn't have a whole lot to offer her, besides highly addictive pain pills.They put her on disability so she got her monthly payment from SSI and didn't have to work. But really, that whole thing was a rather sad "solution". (90% of the time, she was as mobile as anyone else. There had to be a way she could hold down a job despite her issues.) She figured out that regular visits to a chiropractor really helped loosen up tight back muscles and certain adjustments gave her temporary pain relief and less likelihood of her back totally freezing up on her. She couldn't afford to go often, but did so when she could get a deal from a chiropractor who took pity on her situation.
It's not as simple as you're making it out to be though. It's not as though we suddenly had a top 1% of earners in America who became exponentially more greedy than any CEOs were in history, suddenly declaring "Screw everyone else! I want it ALL myself!"
Futurist writers wouldn't have predicted such a thing because it made no sense, and still doesn't.
What's really changed is the ability to get your government to collude with your attempt to build an empire. Say you have a big pharmaceutical firm? You get to buy freshly invented drugs from universities who developed them using student labor. Then turn around and mass market them with whatever arbitrarily high price tag you feel like putting on them. Federal government grants you patent protection on those drugs for years, so anyone wanting them has to pay your asking price to obtain then. Competing drug manufactured for much less money in another country? Too bad.... illegal to import it and prescribe it here! But *sure*, you're entitled to getting that asking price because hey, it's a "free market"!
Or take a look at our broadband Internet providers.... The most successful and profitable are companies like Comcast, who categorically get ranked among the most hated companies with the worst customer service. In anything resembling a true free market economy, such things guarantee a downfall of a company in short order. In today's America? Nah... they're declared regulated monopolies, offering something so special and infrastructure intensive, they need government protection.
You claim that, "It will never be more efficient to hire one worker for 20 hours and one slightly less competent worker for 20 hours. It will always be more efficient to have the higher quality worker work 40 hours. So companies will always have an incentive to hire less people and work them at least 40-45 hours."
Do you have some sort of study to link to that attempts to prove this statement?
I'm not necessarily finding a reason I'd agree.... Presumably, you attempted to hire 2 people for a job with a very similar level of proficiency. No two people are going to be identical, but typically, you encounter all sorts of different challenges as you do your job, day to day. Unless you're on an assembly line, robotically doing a repetitive task -- you're going to generally find there are certain things that come up that you're REALLY good at, and other things you're not so good at.
All in all, I suspect it usually averages out where one person may be "slightly less competent" than the other at the primary tasks at-hand, but the other may have useful skills that allow them to do a better job with the outlying tasks that pop up.
And besides, nobody working a 40 hour week is truly focused on their work the entire 40 hours. People tend to zone out or slack off, especially after they've worked at the same place for a while and know what they can and can't get away with. I'd say you could very likely get more productivity from two people, each working 20 hours weeks, since they'd come in more motivated to get things done during the limited time they're going to spend at the place each week.
If you're a legal U.S. citizen OR you have a legal work visa, I don't think you have anything to be "nervous" about?
Yeah, the mainstream media likes to work people up into a frenzy over "what COULD happen" based on the conjecture of reporters with no first-hand knowledge of anything. But just listening to Trump's own speeches (which are so poorly spoken, it's obvious they come from him and aren't the result of careful editing and vetting like most presidential speeches) -- he keeps clarifying that all of his immigration issues are about stopping the "undocumented" people.
Last I checked, Apple wasn't employing a bunch of illegal immigrants who have no green cards?
And quite frankly, I've been a bit disappointed that "Mr. Build-a-Wall" has said so little about cracking down on the number of H1B visas we keep granting people to come over here and do our tech jobs. That's one area where it's FAR from provable that we just don't have anyone in America capable of doing the work....
Actually, my experience has been that the VAST majority of the time a computer is stolen, it's a laptop that gets stolen while the owner is out and about someplace with it. Therefore, even if it's covered under the homeowners' policy, it's not going to make any sense to claim it. Even if it was a high-end system with costly accessories in the laptop bag -- it wouldn't be worth THAT much over any deductible. And homeowners' insurance tends to automatically drop you if you make 2 claims within something like a 5-10 year period of time. So you'd effectively be wasting your one claim that you'd want to use for a REAL issue (like a total loss due to fire).
As a side note, on auto insurance? You're basically correct, except any time you're buying a brand new car, you should also be looking at buying Gap insurance that covers the difference between the car's supposed value and what you actually owe on the loan. The dealerships who hawk it at the time of the sale usually sell policies that cost 3x as much as what your own auto insurance agency would charge to add it to your existing policy, so it's worth making some calls about for quotes, at the very least.
I don't know where you live, and that has a huge effect on how efficient a PV solar setup would be for a residence. But I thought solar was a great idea too, and decided to purchase a system for our home in Maryland, a few years ago. (I wasn't willing to take a chance on any of these solar lease arrangements. Too many horror stories from realtors about issues transferring those contracts if the homeowner wants to sell the house, etc.)
I spent the extra money for more costly SunPower branded panels after we ran the numbers using several cost calculators. (I only had a limited amount of roof space facing south or east that made sense to put panels on, so the extra 20% or so efficiency of the SunPower panels over the cheaper brands was like having 20% more roof space to put them on.)
Since then? I'd have to say the whole thing will probably come out to little more than a wash. The initial calculations of how much savings I'd get over time were made using some incorrect assumptions, for starters. The biggest one was a false promise by the solar installer that special low rate loans were available to finance the purchase. There was, indeed, a "bridge loan" that financed the first $10,000 of the installation cost at 0% interest for a year. The point of taking advantage of that was the theory that it allowed paying for the project immediately, but letting you pay the loan off using the Federal tax rebate you'd receive the next tax season for going solar. (The Federal refund was supposed to be 1/3rd. of the total cost of your installation.) The problem is, I didn't receive my whole rebate back at tax time. It was split in half, so I could only claim the second half of it the following tax year. So then I had to scramble to try to pay off the bridge loan before I was hit with interest charges on it.
The remainder of the installation was paid for with a solar loan -- but not one with nearly as good of interest rates as the installer promised. They told me to go through a specific lender they had special arrangements with, but those arrangements were considerably different than what the salesperson claimed. When I tried to shop around elsewhere, I quickly found most banks consider solar panel installation something you have to cover using a personal loan, at an interest rate of at least 7.9%. A few lenders even pretend they offer special loans for solar, but the rates are the same as personal loans elsewhere.
So.... any savings my panels give me on power are eaten into by loan interest, until that 10 year loan is paid off.
Now, I understand this won't be everyone's situation. If you have the money sitting around to just buy something like this straight out, great. No loans to worry about. And others may have owned a home long enough to be able to use a home equity line of credit, with better terms. BUT, you still have other factors to consider. For starters, they talk about the panels lasting 25-30 years, but be more worried about the inverters. My home has 2 of them -- one for an array of panels on the separate garage roof, and one on the house itself. Those things aren't cheap, and they have an expected lifespan of little more than 10 years. I believe the warranty on mine only lasts 5.
And it's not necessarily a HUGE issue, but it's worth factoring in the fact that you'll get stuck paying an electrician to take the panels off your roof and reinstall them if you ever need the roof re-shingled or repaired. Over 20-30 years, this is probably going to happen at least once.
And beyond that, you just don't know what electrical rates will be 20 years into the future. The solar salespeople love to create spreadsheets or charts indicating a gradual increase in those rates due to inflation -- but those don't reflect reality that well. In reality, I've seen rates fluctuate but occasionally drop or hold steady due to such things as finding new natural gas deposits in the U.S. and power companies putting more natural gas powered generators online. If "Green" alternatives become
Our company used Basecamp about 5-6 years ago, and gladly phased it out. The fact that it doesn't facilitate any free flowing chat communications was a huge negative for us. I understand needs vary -- but we adopted Slack precisely because we saw how much misc. chatter took place inside email, cluttering up mailboxes. Our business does marketing and facilitating shows and events, with lots of creative types working on various projects or ideas. There's always going to be a need for an easy way for employee A to spontaneously propose some ideas to employees B, C and D. When we're all located in offices spread across the country, you can't just walk over to their desk or cube.
For organizing projects and creating a formal process for handling purchase orders (among other things), we adopted Podio as our platform. I'll be the first to say I hate a lot of things about Podio. Primarily, it's sluggish in a browser, plus it always feels like you're working in some kind of page designer/editor rather than a "production" web site. We started using it for computer inventory, linked to an employee database in it that H.R, maintains. The workflow itself is logical, but Podio is too clunky, IMO, at letting you do the actual input of the inventory or searches in it. But it works amazingly well for our purchase order process, letting us select the appropriate "approvers" with a single click, and having it shoot out the right email or push notifications to those folks that a new P.O. request was put in. They can approve them electronically and move right along.
But Basecamp? Unless it did a LOT of major upgrades in the last 4 years or so since we abandoned it? That wasn't working well for us at all.
I'll have to say, CenturyLink did an AWFUL job as the "middle man" selling our company a fiber broadband connection in to one of their offices in the midwest. We signed a contract with them because they guaranteed us a rate far below the next lowest bid we received, so we were willing to put up with a certain amount of inferior customer service.... I mean, once fiber is installed, it usually "just works" -- and the random, occasional outage is something that happens no matter which company you pay. (Can't stop the idiot with a backhoe who digs without checking what's in the ground first, etc.)
But the insanity started, just getting the initial connection up and running. CenturyTel kept scheduling installation appointment times where a technician would show up, but then was stuck because he had to call in to get things done on the back end. They'd put him on endless hold, followed by one excuse for another -- causing him to have to leave and reschedule another time! This went on for at least 3 appointments in a row. One time, the call center actually told the guy "Everyone was in a company meeting so nobody could assist him with the install." Who runs a call center like that?!
Sure.... more deregulation is great, IF that includes removal of all the government granted exceptions to free market participation these telcos still receive!
As I've always said before: Comcast would be out of business, they way they've done business, if they were competing in a real free market. Apparently, same can be said for CenturyTel.
"What you're doing damages the environment." is an argument, but not one that just means everybody should start forking out money left and right, in some kind of foolish notion that the problem will vanish if only enough dollars are thrown at it.
My company standardized on using Slack, not that long ago... and now our sister company wants it rolled out too.
My initial impression was exactly what some of you are saying. Basically.... WTF?! It's just somebody reselling a webified IRC client all over again! But now that we've used it a while, I get the attraction to it.
#1 is the overall realization that in corporate America, email has reigned supreme for the last decade plus. People can literally spend a productive 8 hour day camping out in Microsoft Outlook, scheduling meetings or appointments, updating to-do lists, and of course reading and responding to hundreds of emails. The mail system has become a virtual filing cabinet for many users, with dozens and dozens of nested sub-folders created, housing all the email messages and attached files they found relevant. That creates multiple dilemmas for businesses. They have to fend off the ever present threat of malware coming in via email, for starters. But they also get stuck paying all of their employees for lots of time spent deleting mail to keep mailboxes from filling up. Mailboxes that DO fill up caused bounced messages, often at the worst possible times (employee in the middle of large projects requiring a lot of correspondence and working with large file attachments coming in regularly). There's total information overload in most people's mailboxes, so important messages don't always get read promptly, or get missed completely.
Slack promises a solution to much of this. It drastically cuts down on how much mail goes back and forth internally in the company once people get used to using it. No reason to email a co-worker or a group of them when you can just send the message in the appropriate Slack channel. Everything ever typed into Slack, including attachments pasted into channels, is preserved indefinitely with full search capabilities on it. (When a channel is deleted, it's never really just deleted. Rather, it's given an archived status so you can still reattach to it any time and search its content.)
#2 is the fact that Slack focused pretty heavily on integration with outside programs. It's not just a chat room for PEOPLE, but an aggregator for alerts and notifications generated automatically by other programs and services. We created several channels just for I.T. staff that collect notifications about such things as our CrashPlan backups and upcoming maintenance alerts by our phone system provider. These can be easily configured to alert our phones with push notifications out of Slack too. So it's a one stop shop or clearinghouse to reign in all of that chatter from the cloud services we use.
And lastly? Slack seems to offer enough flexibility so channels can be created with appropriate security permissions so outside vendors or even clients can be invited to participate in discussions without revealing everything else discussed in the system. When we started out email migration project, we invited the consultants to a special Slack channel so all of us can hash out details or ask/answer questions without ever resorting to email chains.
I get that Slack didn't do anything that's super innovative... but so often, it's not about being first. Apple didn't invent the concept of the MP3 music file OR the portable MP3 music player, but they sure did run with those ideas and build a hugely successful online music store and music hardware sales model from it!
Yeah, but it's all about how much compromise is necessary.
It's really not difficult to choose clothing options that are machine washable, 99% of the time. When you get into formal-wear, that changes -- but that's usually where people are willing to live with the disadvantages of having to take that tux or suit to the dry cleaners.... They're not going to wear it every day.
Dishwasher-safe dishes? Again, not too tough to do that. I think I could safely say I'd accidentally have 90% dishwasher safe dishes if I just bought what I wanted without checking it first.
I owned 2 different Roombas at my old house, and it was a pretty optimal environment for them. (All hard-wood floors and vinyl flooring. Single story ranch type layout. Not even much furniture it could go under, since my coffee table and living room couch and loveseat sat flat on the floor. No pets.) Both units died in under a year and were always needing manual assistance. The dust bins are too small so they can fill up long before a whole cleaning job is finished. Batteries wear out and stop holding a good charge. The spinning brush that gets along the baseboards breaks apart and needs occasional replacement. Hair or lint always winds around gears and rollers inside and causes jams and other malfunctions. IR electric eye failed on one of them. Just not worth the hassle at all, vs. pulling out the Dyson vacuum and taking care of things by hand.
Not so sure about that.... If the school policies mandate the teachers and staff aren't even allowed to QUESTION why someone was suspiciously going into the opposite sex bathroom, that makes it much harder to prosecute if a crime is committed. The credible witness testimony would presumably come from faculty or staff in a normal situation. But now, they're not even going to pay any attention to who goes into which restroom.
There's going to be plenty of fallout from this decision, including teens having sex in the restrooms on a regular basis. (Sure, it happened before when someone thought they could get away with sneaking into a janitor's closet or something. But now you have a place where the school rules actually protect your ability to do it and get away with it!)
Unless a switch to "Green energy" makes economic sense, it doesn't make any sense. I could decide to heat and cool my home and power everything in it without any fossil fuels being burned at all if I got funding for a mini nuclear power plant in my back yard. But it'd NEVER make any real economic sense to do it (even if you assume all the safety issues are handled far better than today's reactors handle them).
I'd be better served by Apple cutting prices on its products, rather than financing the latest politically-correct or trendy Green energy initiative that wasn't able to justify its existence to any traditional lenders. But no... Instead, we're supposed to pay $129.99 each for the new Apple wireless keyboards (with non-replaceable rechargeable batteries inside them). What a value, right?
I have no problem with the LGBTQ community's existence, but suggesting the right-wing conservative Republicans' belief that marriage rights shouldn't extend to couples of the same gender is equivalent to or justifies murder? That's absolute nonsense.
The fact is, I'm a Libertarian, so don't identify as part of either of the 2 major parties. But I have plenty of friends who belong to the Republican party, and even my wife is active in the party at the local level. Pretty much NONE of those people I've met count themselves among the ones who want to take away LGBTQ rights. There are some of us who take issue with the recent bathroom controversy -- but hey, I take issue with it myself! The problem there is, you're trying to mess with a real basic status quo that was NEVER perceived as a real issue for anybody throughout all of history, but is suddenly a big deal. I do have a problem with my kid's school deciding, for example, that women can use the men's restroom at will, or vice-versa, without the faculty even being allowed to so much as mention or question it. If you want to go to THAT length, you may as well handle it the right way - making each bathroom unisex and only allowing one person in each one at a time. But why didn't we do that from the start? Because, efficiency! It made good financial sense to let a number of people use stalls at once, in one common restroom, with the (presumably) most basic of stipulations that only the same gender could use a particular one.
Well.... the next question you have to ask is why these things are "out of sight, out of mind"? I mean, why are the sweatshops something I don't see anymore as an American -- even though they're all over the place in Asia or Africa?
ProTip: Government is the core answer
If your nation is run with a central government that doesn't care at all about the citizenry, then human rights violations will happen. And regardless of whether or not I buy a product that's made by people in that unfortunate situation? It's still going to happen, until those people collectively rise up and overthrow their corrupt government.
At some point, I have to resign myself to understanding that I've got enough to be concerned with just looking out for myself and my own family. To a lesser extent, I'm going to expend some more energy looking out for my friends or relatives, or even the rest of the people in my own community (attending city hall meetings when something needs to be said or voted on, etc.). I might even have a bit of time and energy left to go to the polls and cast a vote for someone claiming to represent me at the state level, or vote for a president once every 4 years. But I'll be damned if I'm going to make my life more difficult and complicated trying to better things for someone living in a totalitarian dictatorship half way around the globe, when any impact my choices would have is almost immeasurably tiny.
Apple's App Store will still allow downloading the security and OS updates without you being signed in with a particular iCloud user account. You just need that for anything else you want to download.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah.... per year. Ok... that makes much more sense. For some reason, I thought he was talking about a monthly payment, but no clue what made me think he alluded to that in the original article now that I look back at it.
It just further reinforces my original points though. Even if Alaska was offering me potentially $1,000-$2,000 per MONTH to move there, I wouldn't consider it enough justification to do it.
When the need arises, I usually go with Uber. No opinion on Lyft except it just doesn't have the same availability. Where I live, nobody is driving for them right now - but Uber has a local presence.
Also use traditional cabs in the right situation. (EG. If you land at the airport in New Orleans and need to get to your hotel? You may as well just use a cab, because they've made the whole process so easy. They charge a flat rate so you know exactly what it will cost, and they have someone at the airport right by the exit door who helps flag down the next available cab in an orderly fashion for you. They even hand you a standard printed packet with some coupons for area establishments along with the cab's rate card and info to contact customer service if you have any issues with your ride.)
Zuckerberg seems to conveniently ignore the fact that the dividends paid on oil in Alaska are a pretty unique scenario in the USA. That was implemented long before anyone was running around praising the virtues of a UBI for all citizens. Everyone has understood that the money paid out for being an Alaska citizen is well balanced out by some huge downsides of choosing Alaska as your place of residence.
If this wasn't the case, you'd have a disproportionately large number of people moving to Alaska with their families, hoping to collect that $5,000 - $6,000 per month of zero effort income. Heck, one might ask why Zuck didn't start Facebook from Alaska, given how great those monthly government payouts are?
The frustrating thing about UBI is you've got people from all political affiliations discussing it as a potentially viable (even inevitable) outcome, but they're really talking about two COMPLETELY different things. The people trying to push for implementing it today are just pushing socialism under a different name. If the economy is based on Capitalism, a UBI won't ever do anything except create inflation. The economy will adjust to the assumption that everyone suddenly has this "baseline income" they can spend, even if they do nothing at all to try to earn more.
The types discussing UBI as a long term possibility are more interested in a hypothetical post-Capitalist economy where automation and technology has advanced so far, it made human labor obsolete. Machines are fixing other machines that do all manner of work required. In this scenario, people would be essentially free to pursue anything that interested them. Money would still change hands, but you'd only use it for "extras". Perhaps hand-made furniture would become a luxury that many people appreciated as a type of art, despite anyone being able to obtain all the basic furniture they needed at little or no cost, given out by a government in charge of the operation of the robots and machines that assemble the rest of it? So if you WANTED to do it, you could build your own furniture and sell it at a premium. But you would have no NEED to work to survive. But this is more like the "Star Trek" universe than reality any time in the near future.
Like I pointed out on another forum recently .... after 6 or 7 generations of them, you still can't even buy a Roomba that reliably cleans your house with no human intervention. They break regularly, need new batteries, brushes and other parts, get stuck under furniture, can't clean stairs, and have dust bins that are so small they need regular assistance emptying them out. All the hype about robots taking all the jobs? We're a LONG way from that reality still.
Statistically, we've got fewer and fewer avid TV watchers. People, by and large, realize that there are other things more worthy of their time. The result is, you've got a larger percentage of low IQ and low motivation losers actually watching television for hours each day, so it's no surprise the programming is adjusted to suit them.
The people with any kind of clue are gravitating more towards programming on demand like Netflix, where you get to watch what YOU want to see, WHEN you want to see it. And they're spending more time online where things aren't just a 1 way passive digestion of media.
I agree with you... don't get me wrong. I've worked in I.T. for around 20 years in small to mid-sized businesses, both more "blue collar" type manufacturing places and "white collar" marketing places. And my own experiences are the same as yours. My co-workers and I in I.T. just want to get things done and accomplish the goal of making the business run a little bit better for everybody. Female co-workers I've worked with always seemed to be on that same page, and I don't recall any of the issues you keep hearing about in Silicon Valley.
But that said? Another person who replied to your post is correct too. This behavior tends to come from those in power positions in companies, not the "rank and file" workers.
The upper management types are used to making demands and having the rest of the workforce rush around trying to meet those demands. Is it stupid for them to risk their well-paid position for a sexual affair with somebody? Arguably yes! But sex has always been about emotions over logic. And for some, the thrill of "possibly getting caught" makes the whole thing way more exciting and enticing.
I've definitely worked at a couple of places where I had strong suspicions that an attractive younger gal was, indeed, involved in a secret relationship with a President or CIO of Finance. The whole time I worked for those companies though? They were never formally accused or "outed" for it. I suspect that's reality in the Valley too. A lot of this misbehavior has gone unpunished because plenty of females working there don't want to lose a good paying job that keeps a roof over their head and a car note paid. And being subordinate to the folks in the power positions at or near the top? They're going to have a big, uphill battle involving attorneys at great expense if they want to go up against it.
If you look at the iPad's history, you find it was something Steve Jobs basically dreamed up as his health was starting to fail and he was spending more time lying in hospital beds, or at least lying down, resting.
And that's pretty much exactly what the device was outstanding at doing .... providing a better experience for viewing or manipulating digital content when you're not sitting down.
Not only did it make a pretty good device to read your emails in bed at night, but it turns out it was pretty handy for doctors who have to work with and review data while standing up or walking around.
Ever since Tim Cook became CEO, the whole tone seems to have changed. He made public comments that he hardly uses a laptop computer anymore and seems to truly think tablets and touchscreens are the future of computing for a large segment of the population.
No matter how hard Apple pushes that idea though? Where I see iPads proliferating the most are at the opposite end of the spectrum. More and more, they're being implemented as single purpose control panels or kiosks. You can hang one on a conference room wall and integrate it with a calendar/scheduling system so everyone can book meetings with a couple of taps, or see when the room is going to be in use. It may even remote control the video-conference itself. These uses don't require a high end model though. Right now, all of these "Square registers" used in small stores and everything else are essentially re-purposing and extending the lives of all of the older iPads still in operation.
The high end iPad Pros have a niche for artists, certainly. But otherwise, they really only make sense as compliments to a full blown computer. When you know you won't need the power or full functionality of a notebook, you can bring the iPad instead.
I tend to agree. I don't have any first- hand knowledge of the job situation in Israel, but it sounds parallel to what I see all the time in America, really.
People come up with all of these startup business concepts that (of course) require custom code to be written to build the software that will run on phones, tablets or computers to make it all happen. But they view the code building process a lot like hiring people to build a new shed in their yard or to do landscaping work.
Basically, they want cheap labor, and aren't opposed to using foreigners if that saves a lot of money on the project's cost.
Just this afternoon, I was attending a "lunch and learn" type of I.T. event and overheard the head of a cloud service provider talking about his past and background. He said he started out learning to code and worked as a software developer for 5 or 6 years. But eventually, he realized it was the type of career where you could spend 8 hour days sitting in front of a PC at your own house and not even socializing with anybody you work for. Perhaps, you'd have a meeting for an hour or two, once a week. But otherwise, you were forgotten about except as another "line item" on people's project management plan. "Check on progress of code for XYZ." That's why he started his own company on the service side of things, and never looked back.
And generally, I'd say that's gotten worse in recent years. Now, you're just disposable in many cases. Code up what you're asked to build, and then they might get rid of you if they don't have any new software project plans in the works. Code maintenance and fixes? Meh... outsource those to some OTHER 3rd. party who comes in as the low bidder.
I never took much interest in the coding part of computing either. (Well, I wrote a bulletin board system in BASIC back in the 80's -- but that's the extent of it for me.) I think if you really care about it though, it should be treated like a craft that you keep working to improve, year after year -- probably while building applications you can sell for yourself. Otherwise, you're liable to get short-changed.
In many smaller cities and towns, the water treatment plants are older (circa 1970's or so) and expensive to maintain. I live in one such city, along the Potomac River, and our water bills are combined with sewer and trash pickup. We're billed once every 3 months, and the typical bill is easily in excess of $350. Trash collection is only once per week here, with no yard waste pickup - so it really only amounts to $80 or so of the total bill. The rest is sewer and water, which go hand-in-hand.
If you have a small water leak, such as a toilet that keeps running after you flush it and you don't catch and correct it immediately? It can easily run the water bill up to the $600-800 range.
So yeah.... there is actually some incentive for a dishonest person to hack the system in some way, if possible.
One of my best friends decided to become a chiropractor, years ago -- so I got to learn a fair bit about that whole process and the challenges it presented.
First off? Yeah, it's true. A whole lot of people become a chiropractor because they're looking for a profession they can make a lot of money in, without all the studying required for a genuine medical degree. This isn't unlike a lot of people who go into dentistry though, either. In other words, it's not really a reason to write the whole field off as useless. It just means you've got to navigate the "minefield" of people who care more about buying their next luxury car or vacation home than your health.
But the other issue is, chiropractors do generally struggle to get well established. The guys with the big practices running ads on the radio constantly are the few that the rest of them aspire to be someday. People like my buddy started out genuinely wanting to help people manage their pain without resorting to getting all doped up on pain medications. That's, IMO, pretty legitimate. Problem is -- that doesn't quite pay the bills. His chiropractic college he graduated from put him almost 6 figures in student loan debt, and then he had to take out the small business loan for his own office and equipment. What usually happens is the struggling chiro says, "You know.... I could really use something to pad my revenue and pay the rent on this place. I know this lady who does acupuncture who needs an office to work out of....", or "Nobody ever got hurt taking a few essential vitamins and minerals. I should start selling some of these on the side." Before long, their practice is hawking all sorts of nonsense alternative medicine (because there's a demand for that from those who believe in it), and it's all justifiable if you view it as the power of the placebo effect and state of mind playing a role in how healthy you feel.
I think some people truly do get benefit from chiropractors, and that's a big reason insurance companies will still pay out for visits to them after car accidents. If it was pure quackery, they would have refused to give them a dime long ago. I used to know a gal, for example, who had some serious back problems. On a good day, she'd be up walking or running about like nothing was wrong at all. But she had occasional situations where her back would literally seize up, and she couldn't straighten herself back up after bending over, or found she couldn't get up out of bed in the morning. Traditional doctors didn't have a whole lot to offer her, besides highly addictive pain pills.They put her on disability so she got her monthly payment from SSI and didn't have to work. But really, that whole thing was a rather sad "solution". (90% of the time, she was as mobile as anyone else. There had to be a way she could hold down a job despite her issues.) She figured out that regular visits to a chiropractor really helped loosen up tight back muscles and certain adjustments gave her temporary pain relief and less likelihood of her back totally freezing up on her. She couldn't afford to go often, but did so when she could get a deal from a chiropractor who took pity on her situation.
It's not as simple as you're making it out to be though. It's not as though we suddenly had a top 1% of earners in America who became exponentially more greedy than any CEOs were in history, suddenly declaring "Screw everyone else! I want it ALL myself!"
Futurist writers wouldn't have predicted such a thing because it made no sense, and still doesn't.
What's really changed is the ability to get your government to collude with your attempt to build an empire. Say you have a big pharmaceutical firm? You get to buy freshly invented drugs from universities who developed them using student labor. Then turn around and mass market them with whatever arbitrarily high price tag you feel like putting on them. Federal government grants you patent protection on those drugs for years, so anyone wanting them has to pay your asking price to obtain then. Competing drug manufactured for much less money in another country? Too bad.... illegal to import it and prescribe it here! But *sure*, you're entitled to getting that asking price because hey, it's a "free market"!
Or take a look at our broadband Internet providers.... The most successful and profitable are companies like Comcast, who categorically get ranked among the most hated companies with the worst customer service. In anything resembling a true free market economy, such things guarantee a downfall of a company in short order. In today's America? Nah ... they're declared regulated monopolies, offering something so special and infrastructure intensive, they need government protection.
You claim that, "It will never be more efficient to hire one worker for 20 hours and one slightly less competent worker for 20 hours. It will always be more efficient to have the higher quality worker work 40 hours. So companies will always have an incentive to hire less people and work them at least 40-45 hours."
Do you have some sort of study to link to that attempts to prove this statement?
I'm not necessarily finding a reason I'd agree .... Presumably, you attempted to hire 2 people for a job with a very similar level of proficiency. No two people are going to be identical, but typically, you encounter all sorts of different challenges as you do your job, day to day. Unless you're on an assembly line, robotically doing a repetitive task -- you're going to generally find there are certain things that come up that you're REALLY good at, and other things you're not so good at.
All in all, I suspect it usually averages out where one person may be "slightly less competent" than the other at the primary tasks at-hand, but the other may have useful skills that allow them to do a better job with the outlying tasks that pop up.
And besides, nobody working a 40 hour week is truly focused on their work the entire 40 hours. People tend to zone out or slack off, especially after they've worked at the same place for a while and know what they can and can't get away with. I'd say you could very likely get more productivity from two people, each working 20 hours weeks, since they'd come in more motivated to get things done during the limited time they're going to spend at the place each week.
If you're a legal U.S. citizen OR you have a legal work visa, I don't think you have anything to be "nervous" about?
Yeah, the mainstream media likes to work people up into a frenzy over "what COULD happen" based on the conjecture of reporters with no first-hand knowledge of anything. But just listening to Trump's own speeches (which are so poorly spoken, it's obvious they come from him and aren't the result of careful editing and vetting like most presidential speeches) -- he keeps clarifying that all of his immigration issues are about stopping the "undocumented" people.
Last I checked, Apple wasn't employing a bunch of illegal immigrants who have no green cards?
And quite frankly, I've been a bit disappointed that "Mr. Build-a-Wall" has said so little about cracking down on the number of H1B visas we keep granting people to come over here and do our tech jobs. That's one area where it's FAR from provable that we just don't have anyone in America capable of doing the work....
Actually, my experience has been that the VAST majority of the time a computer is stolen, it's a laptop that gets stolen while the owner is out and about someplace with it. Therefore, even if it's covered under the homeowners' policy, it's not going to make any sense to claim it. Even if it was a high-end system with costly accessories in the laptop bag -- it wouldn't be worth THAT much over any deductible. And homeowners' insurance tends to automatically drop you if you make 2 claims within something like a 5-10 year period of time. So you'd effectively be wasting your one claim that you'd want to use for a REAL issue (like a total loss due to fire).
As a side note, on auto insurance? You're basically correct, except any time you're buying a brand new car, you should also be looking at buying Gap insurance that covers the difference between the car's supposed value and what you actually owe on the loan. The dealerships who hawk it at the time of the sale usually sell policies that cost 3x as much as what your own auto insurance agency would charge to add it to your existing policy, so it's worth making some calls about for quotes, at the very least.
I don't know where you live, and that has a huge effect on how efficient a PV solar setup would be for a residence. But I thought solar was a great idea too, and decided to purchase a system for our home in Maryland, a few years ago. (I wasn't willing to take a chance on any of these solar lease arrangements. Too many horror stories from realtors about issues transferring those contracts if the homeowner wants to sell the house, etc.)
I spent the extra money for more costly SunPower branded panels after we ran the numbers using several cost calculators. (I only had a limited amount of roof space facing south or east that made sense to put panels on, so the extra 20% or so efficiency of the SunPower panels over the cheaper brands was like having 20% more roof space to put them on.)
Since then? I'd have to say the whole thing will probably come out to little more than a wash. The initial calculations of how much savings I'd get over time were made using some incorrect assumptions, for starters. The biggest one was a false promise by the solar installer that special low rate loans were available to finance the purchase. There was, indeed, a "bridge loan" that financed the first $10,000 of the installation cost at 0% interest for a year. The point of taking advantage of that was the theory that it allowed paying for the project immediately, but letting you pay the loan off using the Federal tax rebate you'd receive the next tax season for going solar. (The Federal refund was supposed to be 1/3rd. of the total cost of your installation.) The problem is, I didn't receive my whole rebate back at tax time. It was split in half, so I could only claim the second half of it the following tax year. So then I had to scramble to try to pay off the bridge loan before I was hit with interest charges on it.
The remainder of the installation was paid for with a solar loan -- but not one with nearly as good of interest rates as the installer promised. They told me to go through a specific lender they had special arrangements with, but those arrangements were considerably different than what the salesperson claimed. When I tried to shop around elsewhere, I quickly found most banks consider solar panel installation something you have to cover using a personal loan, at an interest rate of at least 7.9%. A few lenders even pretend they offer special loans for solar, but the rates are the same as personal loans elsewhere.
So .... any savings my panels give me on power are eaten into by loan interest, until that 10 year loan is paid off.
Now, I understand this won't be everyone's situation. If you have the money sitting around to just buy something like this straight out, great. No loans to worry about. And others may have owned a home long enough to be able to use a home equity line of credit, with better terms. BUT, you still have other factors to consider. For starters, they talk about the panels lasting 25-30 years, but be more worried about the inverters. My home has 2 of them -- one for an array of panels on the separate garage roof, and one on the house itself. Those things aren't cheap, and they have an expected lifespan of little more than 10 years. I believe the warranty on mine only lasts 5.
And it's not necessarily a HUGE issue, but it's worth factoring in the fact that you'll get stuck paying an electrician to take the panels off your roof and reinstall them if you ever need the roof re-shingled or repaired. Over 20-30 years, this is probably going to happen at least once.
And beyond that, you just don't know what electrical rates will be 20 years into the future. The solar salespeople love to create spreadsheets or charts indicating a gradual increase in those rates due to inflation -- but those don't reflect reality that well. In reality, I've seen rates fluctuate but occasionally drop or hold steady due to such things as finding new natural gas deposits in the U.S. and power companies putting more natural gas powered generators online. If "Green" alternatives become
Our company used Basecamp about 5-6 years ago, and gladly phased it out. The fact that it doesn't facilitate any free flowing chat communications was a huge negative for us. I understand needs vary -- but we adopted Slack precisely because we saw how much misc. chatter took place inside email, cluttering up mailboxes. Our business does marketing and facilitating shows and events, with lots of creative types working on various projects or ideas. There's always going to be a need for an easy way for employee A to spontaneously propose some ideas to employees B, C and D. When we're all located in offices spread across the country, you can't just walk over to their desk or cube.
For organizing projects and creating a formal process for handling purchase orders (among other things), we adopted Podio as our platform. I'll be the first to say I hate a lot of things about Podio. Primarily, it's sluggish in a browser, plus it always feels like you're working in some kind of page designer/editor rather than a "production" web site. We started using it for computer inventory, linked to an employee database in it that H.R, maintains. The workflow itself is logical, but Podio is too clunky, IMO, at letting you do the actual input of the inventory or searches in it. But it works amazingly well for our purchase order process, letting us select the appropriate "approvers" with a single click, and having it shoot out the right email or push notifications to those folks that a new P.O. request was put in. They can approve them electronically and move right along.
But Basecamp? Unless it did a LOT of major upgrades in the last 4 years or so since we abandoned it? That wasn't working well for us at all.
I'll have to say, CenturyLink did an AWFUL job as the "middle man" selling our company a fiber broadband connection in to one of their offices in the midwest.
We signed a contract with them because they guaranteed us a rate far below the next lowest bid we received, so we were willing to put up with a certain amount of inferior customer service.... I mean, once fiber is installed, it usually "just works" -- and the random, occasional outage is something that happens no matter which company you pay. (Can't stop the idiot with a backhoe who digs without checking what's in the ground first, etc.)
But the insanity started, just getting the initial connection up and running. CenturyTel kept scheduling installation appointment times where a technician would show up, but then was stuck because he had to call in to get things done on the back end. They'd put him on endless hold, followed by one excuse for another -- causing him to have to leave and reschedule another time! This went on for at least 3 appointments in a row. One time, the call center actually told the guy "Everyone was in a company meeting so nobody could assist him with the install." Who runs a call center like that?!
Sure.... more deregulation is great, IF that includes removal of all the government granted exceptions to free market participation these telcos still receive!
As I've always said before: Comcast would be out of business, they way they've done business, if they were competing in a real free market. Apparently, same can be said for CenturyTel.
"What you're doing damages the environment." is an argument, but not one that just means everybody should start forking out money left and right, in some kind of foolish notion that the problem will vanish if only enough dollars are thrown at it.
My company standardized on using Slack, not that long ago ... and now our sister company wants it rolled out too.
My initial impression was exactly what some of you are saying. Basically.... WTF?! It's just somebody reselling a webified IRC client all over again! But now that we've used it a while, I get the attraction to it.
#1 is the overall realization that in corporate America, email has reigned supreme for the last decade plus. People can literally spend a productive 8 hour day camping out in Microsoft Outlook, scheduling meetings or appointments, updating to-do lists, and of course reading and responding to hundreds of emails. The mail system has become a virtual filing cabinet for many users, with dozens and dozens of nested sub-folders created, housing all the email messages and attached files they found relevant. That creates multiple dilemmas for businesses. They have to fend off the ever present threat of malware coming in via email, for starters. But they also get stuck paying all of their employees for lots of time spent deleting mail to keep mailboxes from filling up. Mailboxes that DO fill up caused bounced messages, often at the worst possible times (employee in the middle of large projects requiring a lot of correspondence and working with large file attachments coming in regularly). There's total information overload in most people's mailboxes, so important messages don't always get read promptly, or get missed completely.
Slack promises a solution to much of this. It drastically cuts down on how much mail goes back and forth internally in the company once people get used to using it. No reason to email a co-worker or a group of them when you can just send the message in the appropriate Slack channel. Everything ever typed into Slack, including attachments pasted into channels, is preserved indefinitely with full search capabilities on it. (When a channel is deleted, it's never really just deleted. Rather, it's given an archived status so you can still reattach to it any time and search its content.)
#2 is the fact that Slack focused pretty heavily on integration with outside programs. It's not just a chat room for PEOPLE, but an aggregator for alerts and notifications generated automatically by other programs and services. We created several channels just for I.T. staff that collect notifications about such things as our CrashPlan backups and upcoming maintenance alerts by our phone system provider. These can be easily configured to alert our phones with push notifications out of Slack too. So it's a one stop shop or clearinghouse to reign in all of that chatter from the cloud services we use.
And lastly? Slack seems to offer enough flexibility so channels can be created with appropriate security permissions so outside vendors or even clients can be invited to participate in discussions without revealing everything else discussed in the system. When we started out email migration project, we invited the consultants to a special Slack channel so all of us can hash out details or ask/answer questions without ever resorting to email chains.
I get that Slack didn't do anything that's super innovative... but so often, it's not about being first. Apple didn't invent the concept of the MP3 music file OR the portable MP3 music player, but they sure did run with those ideas and build a hugely successful online music store and music hardware sales model from it!
Yeah, but it's all about how much compromise is necessary.
It's really not difficult to choose clothing options that are machine washable, 99% of the time. When you get into formal-wear, that changes -- but that's usually where people are willing to live with the disadvantages of having to take that tux or suit to the dry cleaners.... They're not going to wear it every day.
Dishwasher-safe dishes? Again, not too tough to do that. I think I could safely say I'd accidentally have 90% dishwasher safe dishes if I just bought what I wanted without checking it first.
I owned 2 different Roombas at my old house, and it was a pretty optimal environment for them. (All hard-wood floors and vinyl flooring. Single story ranch type layout. Not even much furniture it could go under, since my coffee table and living room couch and loveseat sat flat on the floor. No pets.) Both units died in under a year and were always needing manual assistance. The dust bins are too small so they can fill up long before a whole cleaning job is finished. Batteries wear out and stop holding a good charge. The spinning brush that gets along the baseboards breaks apart and needs occasional replacement. Hair or lint always winds around gears and rollers inside and causes jams and other malfunctions. IR electric eye failed on one of them. Just not worth the hassle at all, vs. pulling out the Dyson vacuum and taking care of things by hand.
Not so sure about that .... If the school policies mandate the teachers and staff aren't even allowed to QUESTION why someone was suspiciously going into the opposite sex bathroom, that makes it much harder to prosecute if a crime is committed. The credible witness testimony would presumably come from faculty or staff in a normal situation. But now, they're not even going to pay any attention to who goes into which restroom.
There's going to be plenty of fallout from this decision, including teens having sex in the restrooms on a regular basis. (Sure, it happened before when someone thought they could get away with sneaking into a janitor's closet or something. But now you have a place where the school rules actually protect your ability to do it and get away with it!)
Unless a switch to "Green energy" makes economic sense, it doesn't make any sense. I could decide to heat and cool my home and power everything in it without any fossil fuels being burned at all if I got funding for a mini nuclear power plant in my back yard. But it'd NEVER make any real economic sense to do it (even if you assume all the safety issues are handled far better than today's reactors handle them).
I'd be better served by Apple cutting prices on its products, rather than financing the latest politically-correct or trendy Green energy initiative that wasn't able to justify its existence to any traditional lenders. But no ... Instead, we're supposed to pay $129.99 each for the new Apple wireless keyboards (with non-replaceable rechargeable batteries inside them). What a value, right?
I have no problem with the LGBTQ community's existence, but suggesting the right-wing conservative Republicans' belief that marriage rights shouldn't extend to couples of the same gender is equivalent to or justifies murder? That's absolute nonsense.
The fact is, I'm a Libertarian, so don't identify as part of either of the 2 major parties. But I have plenty of friends who belong to the Republican party, and even my wife is active in the party at the local level. Pretty much NONE of those people I've met count themselves among the ones who want to take away LGBTQ rights. There are some of us who take issue with the recent bathroom controversy -- but hey, I take issue with it myself! The problem there is, you're trying to mess with a real basic status quo that was NEVER perceived as a real issue for anybody throughout all of history, but is suddenly a big deal. I do have a problem with my kid's school deciding, for example, that women can use the men's restroom at will, or vice-versa, without the faculty even being allowed to so much as mention or question it. If you want to go to THAT length, you may as well handle it the right way - making each bathroom unisex and only allowing one person in each one at a time. But why didn't we do that from the start? Because, efficiency! It made good financial sense to let a number of people use stalls at once, in one common restroom, with the (presumably) most basic of stipulations that only the same gender could use a particular one.
Well.... the next question you have to ask is why these things are "out of sight, out of mind"? I mean, why are the sweatshops something I don't see anymore as an American -- even though they're all over the place in Asia or Africa?
ProTip: Government is the core answer
If your nation is run with a central government that doesn't care at all about the citizenry, then human rights violations will happen. And regardless of whether or not I buy a product that's made by people in that unfortunate situation? It's still going to happen, until those people collectively rise up and overthrow their corrupt government.
At some point, I have to resign myself to understanding that I've got enough to be concerned with just looking out for myself and my own family. To a lesser extent, I'm going to expend some more energy looking out for my friends or relatives, or even the rest of the people in my own community (attending city hall meetings when something needs to be said or voted on, etc.). I might even have a bit of time and energy left to go to the polls and cast a vote for someone claiming to represent me at the state level, or vote for a president once every 4 years. But I'll be damned if I'm going to make my life more difficult and complicated trying to better things for someone living in a totalitarian dictatorship half way around the globe, when any impact my choices would have is almost immeasurably tiny.
Apple's App Store will still allow downloading the security and OS updates without you being signed in with a particular iCloud user account. You just need that for anything else you want to download.